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Eliza had sent for two things from her old place: her birdcage and her Chinese fan. After all, clothes would apparently be provided -- and any of her own would just be scoffed at anyway -- but she couldn't cast off all of her prized possessions just because she was whisked up into a new situation. If you really dropped everything -- every blasted thing -- to go under someone else's roof, you were just asking for something to go wrong. Always best to hold on to a last inch or two, when it really came to everything.
And honestly, even in this very fine house, nothing was more decorative than her things: they were gold! Well, not all the way through, of course, but they were golden in places, and it's the eyes that are using the color of it all, really.
Chinese fans were traditionally made, she'd heard tell, for elegant ladies and for scholars, who were also elegant. The more time she spent with one Henry Higgins, the more Eliza started to wonder how much people might confuse elegance and having a lot of fol-de-rol. She wondered if the scholars didn't just mostly use those fans to rap some unfortunate young person's knuckles because the oh-so-elegant gentleman just wasn't impressed enough with all their hard work.
Not that Eliza was going to let any amount of fol-de-rol or misfortune stop her. No matter how much she was kept up all night, no matter how many insults washed around her like people thought she was a rat in their larder (that there was one of the reasons one had to at least hold a few last inches... no matter how good the chocolate was).
Eliza looked at the cage. It was pretty, but one of the things she'd always liked best about looking at it was knowing that she was looking at it from the outside.
She looked around... the room she was in, then back at the cage. She was still outside it. No matter how rough the day had been. And once she was a shop-lady, she would be even less caged. She'd be like ... six cages out, really, as a shop lady.
Wouldn't that be lovely?